Originally Posted by
bocastephen
My Time Machine backup scheme has become unusable - the backup can take days if not over a week and trying various methods of shutting off spotlight or stopping local backups, etc. has not changed anything - now my TM gets to a few hundred MG and just stops.
that is likely due to disk corruption, either on the time machine drive or your computer's drive, possibly both.
for the time machine drive, option-click the time machine icon in the menubar and pick verify backups. for the computer's drive, run disk utility and pick verify. if either or both are corrupted, the best way to fix it is disk warrior.
So, I need an alternative - but a disk cloner is not going to work for me because I might need to fish out and recover individual files to restore instead of the entire drive.
Can anyone recommend a TM alternative that supports file/folder level backup/restore or perhaps a method to kickstart TM and get it working properly again?
you can still restore individual files from a clone. the problem is that the clone is whatever was on your drive when the clone was made. if you delete a file and then clone, it's gone on the clone too.
the advantage to time machine is it takes snapshots, so you can access older versions of files as well as files that have been deleted. there are third party backup utilities that can do that but none that work as seamlessly as time machine.
a good backup strategy is to use both cloning and time machine. they each have advantages and you can never have too many backups.